This entry was posted by admin on February 26, 2010 at 4:30 pm under SAP Modules News.

SAP watcher and general tech pundit Dennis Howlett wrote at ZDNet that, while data management services are in clear need of a tune-up, the company seems to have no particularly strong vision of how that will be accomplished.

Howlett described the company’s recent beta release of cloud collaboration service 12sprints as "a solution looking for a problem that I struggle to understand. I can’t see why SAP is devoting so much air time to pimping it when there are much bigger fish to fry."

Howlett’s central critique was that SAP has not yet fully grasped the nature of the changes coming to the IT sector, and that while "I understand SAP wants to appear cool with skin in the ’social everywhere’ game … it runs the risk of appearing to be as asinine as some of those who think the revolution is coming via ’social everything.’"

The recent release of SAP’s Software-as-a-Service version of its core BusinessObjects suite could be a sign that the company’s decision makers have gotten the messages from pundits like Howlett and others, since the scalable pricing and flexibility of the cloud-based system should boost its appeal to small businesses.